The Scots had an enormous impact on the global development of the British Empire as emigrants, soldiers, merchants and colonial administrators. This book explores in depth many key themes including the slave trade, the Scots on the colonial frontier, Highland soldiers and more.

[This book] tells the ... story of Scotland's role in forging and expanding the Briutish Empire, from the Americas to Australia, India to the Caribbean. By 1820 Britain controlled a fifth of the world's population, and no people had made a more essential contribution than the Scots - working across the globe as soldiers and merchants, administrators and clerics, doctors and teachers. ... Devine traces the vital part Scotland played in creating an empire - and the fundamental effect this had in moulding the modern Scottish nation."--Back cover.

Devine, who is director of research at the AHRB Center for Irish and Scottish studies at the University of Aberdeen, demonstrates that Scots were involved in the British Empire's (or before 1707, the English Empire's) expansion into Quebec and British North America, the Caribbean, India, and Australia. He also chronicles the ideas, hardships, and accomplishments of the Scots who left their homeland; describes Scottish contributions in the Napoleonic Wars; discusses Scotland's industrial transformation; and addresses the influence of Scottish thinkers David Hume and Adam Smith on the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. His final chapter looks at Scottish identity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

The Irish, contends the author, made a remarkable contribution to the Spanish empire during the 17th and early 18th centuries. Morales covers the complexity of Irish migration to the Spanish empire and explores the role that the Irish played in the army, commerce, medicine, literary life and 18th-century Spanish Enlightenment.

Much has been written about the forging of a British identity in the 17th and 18th centuries, from the multiple kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. But the process also ran across the Irish sea and was played out in North America and the Caribbean. In the process, the indigenous peoples of North America, the Caribbean, the Cape, Australia and New Zealand were forced to redefine their identities. This text integrates the history of these areas with British and imperial history. With contributions from both sides of the Atlantic, each chapter deals with a different aspect of British encounters with indigenous peoples in Colonial America and includes, for example, sections on "Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race" and "Hunting and the Politics of Masculinity in Cherokee treaty-making, 1763-1775". This book should be of particular interest to postgraduate students of Colonial American history and early modern British history.

Presents an irreverant and humorous look at the four-hundred-year history of the British empire.

Examines the key roles of Scots in central aspects of the Atlantic and imperial economies from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, and demonstrates that an understanding of the relationship between Scotland and the British Empire is vital both for the understanding of the histories of that country and of many territories of the Empire.